


Your Love's In My Pocket

by whyyesitscar



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:43:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyyesitscar/pseuds/whyyesitscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When it comes to Rachel Berry, you always let go first."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Love's In My Pocket

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by/structured around Janelle Monae's "Oh, Maker." Canon compliant until "I Do," AU from there.

  
_"we suffered a rare, rare blue._   
_so much hurt on this earth,_   
_but you loved me, and i really dared to love you._   
_perhaps what i mean to say is,_   
_is that it's amazing that your love was mine."_   


You’ve seen enough people in enough relationships to know a thing or two about them.  You know what it looks like when people are happy, when they’re sad, when neither of them is really invested anymore. You’ve watched so many relationships totally disintegrate—Kurt and Blaine, Brittany and Santana, Mr. Schuester and every woman he looks at, and there isn’t enough time to talk about your parents—that you’re pretty sure you’ve come up with a list of criteria. You could pretty much write the manual on how to have a happy relationship because you know exactly what they’re _not_ supposed to look like.

1: Honesty might not fix everything, but it won’t create more problems, either.

2: If you feel unsafe, get out. Don’t think. Just leave.

3: Boys with mohawks are always trouble.

4: Smiles hide lies.

5: Sometimes you just have to let go.

(It’s the last one that always gave you trouble. You have a tendency to let go too soon.)

The funniest part about this whole thing is you’ve never had a happy relationship. Not one that lasts, anyway. They cheat on you or you give their promise rings back or sometimes you just let the potential hang in between the both of you, exchanging longing looks over hallways and wheelchairs. There was nothing to let go of with that one because you didn’t have a firm grip to start with.

You’ve had exactly one relationship in your life that felt deeper, more adult, more complete—but it was always going to end.

When it comes to Rachel Berry, you always let go first.

/

**i. here**

It starts at Mr. Schue’s wedding. You haven’t told your mom that you’re back because it doesn’t really matter and you’re pretty sure it’s not going to happen anyway. You decide you’re going to try and be mature about the whole thing and not think about grown men—professors, for example—and how they tell you things that no college boy ever would and make you feel real and special, and then cast you off like you’re still in high school.

You’re not going to think about that and you’re not going to talk to anyone from high school. You’re going to put your fake ID to use and completely demolish the open bar that they better have if they want to be classy. And after you’ve had more martinis than you can handle, you’re going to stumble upstairs to the hotel room you booked with your dad’s credit card and sleep away the burden of Lima. That way, when you go back to Yale and your roommate asks you how the weekend was, you can rightfully say you don’t know.

But that plan gets destroyed very quickly because Rachel accosts you at the door and asks how you’re doing, and you linger just long enough for everyone to wave at you and make mental notes to chat with you later. And it gets worse when Santana sits next to you in the pew because your ears are hearing her judgmental mouth, but your eyes are watching the soft, devastated looks she and Brittany keep throwing each other.

So you sit in the back and snark with Santana. You watch how not-married Mr. Schue gets and you let Santana go off on him, too. You know that if she didn’t have someone to judge, she’d be crying on your shoulder, and both of you have always been better than that.

(You’re not too good to slow-dance with her at the reception, though. Most of the time you’re her friend Quinn Fabray, but when Brittany dances with Sam and smiles about it, sometimes you just have to be her friend.)

The night mostly goes according to plan after that, because of course Santana also has a fake ID and of course she’s going to want to get hammered. She probably wants to get drunker than you, or at least she has a better reason for it. You try to replace her sadness with liquor, even when she looks like she might start sleeping on the bar counter. That’s when you order up some shots because if there’s one thing Santana Lopez can’t resist, it’s tequila.

The other part of why you ordered tequila is because Santana has been looking at you all night, all soft and sad and sweet, and you want to know what’s going to happen. You know what usually happens—you’ve heard it often enough, with boys in the back rooms of parties and Brittany everywhere after that. You’re just not sure it’ll happen with you.

You can’t decide if you’re flustered or flattered when it does.

She drags you up to your hotel room, snagging a bottle of champagne on a brief detour through the kitchen. You think it’s going to be fast and hard when you click the door open—all teeth and tongue and whatever you let her do to you—but instead she kicks off her shoes and flops on the bed.

“Pop the bubbly,” she instructs. “I want to make a preemptive toast.”

You reach down and slip off your heels, smiling. “What are we preempting?” you ask, even though you already know the answer.

Santana gives you a look like she knows you know it, too. “You do know where this night is going, right?”

“Yeah,” you nod. “Why do you think I ordered so many shots?”

“Just making sure,” she mumbles, spreading her arms wider, wrinkling the covers. She lets out a quiet ‘yay!’ when the cork pops. You don’t find any champagne flutes, but a quick scan of the bathroom yields two glasses, the kind that look like they’re meant for cocktails. It seems cheap—not as good as wine glasses but classier than plastic cups—and you’re certainly not drinking from the bottle, so you shrug and pour more than either of you need.

Santana laughs when you flourish her glass. “You surprise me, Q,” she says, narrowing her eyes.

“Why, because I’m in a hotel room about to have casual sex at a wedding? Everyone does that. It’s practically a rite of passage.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Because you’re in a hotel room about to have casual sex with me.”

You cock your head and drink. “Are you saying you’ve never thought about me that way?”

Santana laughs, drunk and obnoxious. “Oh no. I have _totally_ thought about you that way. I knew you were lying when you said you weren’t into it in New York.”

“So then what’s so surprising?”

“That it’s me you’re with,” she shrugs, “and not somebody else.” You furrow your eyebrows when it looks like that’s all she’s going to say. “Let me tell you something about you, Quinn.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not who you were in high school. The Quinn Fabray on the Cheerios was a flat-out bitch who would have burned her brain before she even thought about kissing a girl or having a one-night-stand at all. But now…you dye your hair pink and steal babies and sleep with professors. You could be fucking any handsome, engaging guy at that party. So why are you up here about to have sex with your lonely, sad, and very, _very_ horny best friend?”

You smile. “Because,” you answer, “you’re very lonely, very sad, and very, very horny—and I know how that feels.”

“Boy, Yale must be sucking the life out of you,” Santana quips.

“What life?” you murmur, and suddenly you’re on the bed and there are the teeth and tongue you were expecting (waiting for) and it feels like a familiar kind of foreign, like you’re totally aware of everything you don’t know. You’ve kissed Santana before—and you like to think that you taught her one or two things—but this is the first time without anyone else watching. It’s the first time you’re allowed to get caught up in it, in her lips and neck and hair and hands, so you do. You really do. You get caught up so much that Santana stops you, pushing you off of her and leaning back on her elbows.

“Quinn, wait.”

“Please, Santana,” you practically beg. “Please let me have this.”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. It doesn’t match the rhythm of her breath and you find yourself irrationally annoyed. “I’m not—that’s not why I’m stopping you,” she says, catching her swollen bottom lip in her teeth. You suddenly get all the hype—if you could guarantee that every girl you slept with looked like this ( _before_ anything’s even happened), you’d swear off men for life.

“I want this to happen,” she says, softer than you’d expect with the distillery in her stomach. “I do. I just want to make sure that you do, too.” She shrugs when you roll your eyes. “Look, it doesn’t have to be a big thing, but it can be. I just wanna be sure that you’re cool with whatever it turns out to be.”

You laugh and sit up on the bed, reaching behind to unzip your dress. “I’m not in love with you,” you say. “I’m never going to be in love with you. But I’m sad, you’re hot, and I want you.” You shimmy out of your dress, dropping it onto the floor, and smile at Santana’s eyes. They never leave your body as she takes your cue and strips down.

It feels different, getting checked out by a girl. Like it matters more. Santana’s eyes go where any guy’s would, sure—she spends so long ogling your tits that you’re not sure how you ever believed she was straight. But she looks other places, too. Places like your neck and your wrists and your shoulders.

For a second, you know what it feels like to be Brittany Pierce, and you almost cry.

But Santana’s creeping smile edges any sadness out of your brain, kind of like windshield wipers on glass that isn’t wet enough. She sits up and vacuums her lips to your neck, reaching around and unhooking your bra with the practice of someone who’s done this with a decent amount of people. You kind of want to give her a high-five—the Santana from two years ago was still dreaming about this kind of skill.

“You know,” she pants into your shoulder, “all of my fantasies that aren’t about Britt? You’re probably in half of them.”

“‘Aren’t?’” you gasp back. “Just how many fantasies of me are you having?”

“You moved to Connecticut, Quinn. You didn’t stop being hot. And by the way”—she lowers you to the bed, burying her face in the valley of your breasts—“don’t ever dye your hair again. Blondes are _totally_ way more fun.”

By the end of the night, you believe her.

/

You almost make a clean getaway. Santana leaves the room first, kissing you softly and blushing. You almost tease her for it, but instead you just say that Sam won’t stay forever, and she kisses you again. You take a long shower, washing away the smell and feel of last night but not the memory. It’s the shower that did it, you’ll decide later. Remove the shower and maybe nothing would have happened.

But you spend just the right amount of time in the shower and just the right amount of time getting dressed so that when you open the hotel door, dragging your carry-on suitcase, someone else is leaving a room at the end of the hall. You’d know that neurotic mumbling anywhere, years of performance rehearsals letting you know that when Rachel Berry is feeling unsure, she talks to whatever’s around her. In this case, it’s her hotel room door because she won’t turn around.

You’d just laugh and walk away if the elevators were in the other direction. But they aren’t, so you prepare yourself for whatever she has to say and walk toward her. You still laugh, though.

“Quinn?” she asks. You were almost past her. That’s so Rachel Berry, waiting for the last, dramatic moment to say something.

You take a deep breath and turn around, ready with cheerleader-smiles and teeth. “Hey, Rachel! What a wedding, huh?”

She laughs. She doesn’t think it’s funny, either. “Pretty crazy,” she says, nodding her head. “I wish we’d had more time to talk.”

You hook some hair behind your ears, looking at the floor the same way you do when you want to get out of an awkward conversation as quickly as possible. “Yeah, I, uh, spent most of my time with Santana. She’s…”

“Right,” Rachel nods. “Yeah, she won’t talk about it, but it’s obvious she’s still pretty hung up on Brittany. That was nice of you.”

“Yeah. Listen, I—”

“Was she here a while ago? I thought I heard someone swearing in Spanish.”

You have half a mind to run. Just take a breath, look at Rachel once more, and run down the hall, forsaking the elevators completely and thundering down the stairs like they do in the movies, and you’d catch a perfectly timed cab and huff in the back seat as the driver looks at you weirdly and shakes his head. You’d laugh sardonically all the way to the airport and probably spend the rest of the time waiting for your flight looking out of the window at the terminal, contemplating the planes. You’d smile a small smile once you got in your seat, pull on an eyeshade, and fall asleep. That’s what’s in one half of your mind.

The other half, the annoying half, is the one that stays and answers Rachel’s question instead. “Yeah, that was her,” you say. “She, um—like I said, we spent a lot of time together.”

“Oh,” she nods. “Well, good for you?” she offers, immediately breaking whatever tension has been hanging between you.

“I guess,” you laugh. She laughs a little, too. “Listen, my flight’s not until tonight. You wanna grab some coffee or something?”

“Only if it’s not The Lima Bean,” Rachel answers, wrinkling her nose. “A couple months in New York and I know enough coffee to know how terrible that place was.”

“No, not The Lima Bean,” you reassure. “There’s a little café a town over I used to drive to sometimes. You’ll like it.”

“Okay,” she agrees.

The cab ride over is still kind of weird—no huffing, but the driver is shooting the both of you strange looks. You aren’t saying anything to each other, and you have a hunch that you won’t until you’re seated at a cozy table with hot cups of comfort to sip from.

(You’re right).

You sing-song a “So, what’s new with you?” before both of you break into hysterics. You’ve never been the kind of friends that catch up how other people do. You don’t need introductions or recaps or ice-breakers. Rachel Berry _is_ an ice-breaker. Rachel will start a conversation with anyone, even if they’re not listening. You kind of think that’s how she got Finn to date her.

“Did you have fun at the wedding?” you ask. It’s the way she chokes on her coffee that intrigues you. “Did you?” you push. You gasp at the way her eyes widen. “Rachel Berry, who were you hiding in _your_ room?”

“Finn,” she answers, squirming, and you deflate. It isn’t that it’s Finn, except it sort of is. But mostly it’s just that Rachel Berry is too good to go back to any of her ex-boyfriends. She’s bigger, more important than any of them. You’re about to tell her that when you realize that sometimes, it’s a burden to be big. Sometimes you just want to shrink and rediscover the places that felt safe when you were small.

“You had fun?” Rachel nods. You shrug. “So have your fun, and don’t do it again.”

She laughs. You drink. You’re almost sorry you have to get on a plane.

But Rachel reminds you about the train passes, and you make a promise to visit New York the very next weekend. You even call her favorite restaurant and make reservations right then, just in case you decide to be flaky later.

Your roommate asks you how the weekend was when you get home. You say it was good, and you mean it.

/

**ii. near**

Rachel has terrible taste in restaurants. You learn that quickly, after both of you have visited each other. She finds vegan bistros and chokes down a lifetime’s worth of quinoa, even though her face tells you so clearly that she hates it. You bust her after the third failed meal and take her to a vegetarian sandwich place.

( _Processed flour will not kill you_ , you make her repeat, and she believes you three bites into her avocado wrap.)

You spend most of your visits in New York because Rachel tends to short-circuit when her pace grinds to anything slower than a bustle. She shuttles you around to every tiny coffee place she can think of because she’s determined to find something better than the one by your dorm, which is just about the only good part about New Haven. For hosting such a prestigious school, the city’s kind of a dump.

But she hasn’t beat you yet, so you trade coffeehouses with plays—actual plays, without any singing whatsoever. Rachel squirms through the first one, but you don’t really care because your brain is so fired up. Thinking is your singing. You feel about words and meanings and motivations how Rachel feels about music—like they make your life richer, better, easier to process if you cut it down to nouns and verbs and adjectives. (And sentences and paragraphs, for when you need someone else to process you. You appreciate brevity, but why rely on it so much when there are thousands of words in hundreds of languages that know exactly how you feel?)

Six weekend visits later, Rachel is looking at you the same way Santana did at Mr. Schue’s wedding. You don’t have your little tequila trick to fall back on, but you do have cake. Rachel loves cake. Rachel loves gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake with a very rich chocolate glaze, and you know just where to get it.

If it were anyone else, the giddy grin on Rachel’s face would give you the go-ahead for a kiss. But it isn’t anyone, it’s Rachel, and she looks so pleased she might cry. So you close your eyes and take a bite (because it tastes better when you can’t see), and offer Rachel a napkin with a flick of your wrist.

That’s why you miss it when she kisses you, sugary and quick and just a little sticky.

( _I’m so sorry_ , she says.

_I just…it seemed like the right thing to do,_ she says.

_You have cake on your cheek,_ you say. _Let me get it off for you._

You don’t use your fingers.)

/

You don’t go to New York for a while. Rachel visits you in Connecticut for the next couple of weeks, and Kurt and Santana get suspicious. It gets to the point where you have to force yourself not to pick up Santana’s calls, because you’re so ridiculously happy you know you’d accidentally spill, and Rachel is the best secret you’ve ever kept.

It isn’t like you’re hiding. It’s just that it’s nice to keep this new thing to yourselves, instead of sharing with the people who know you and who will try to dissect what it means. You need to write a new story without letting history get in the way (because if you repeat that, you’re not sure you’ll make it back out.) The people at Yale, they don’t know you. You could be Quinn Fabray, biggest lesbian to ever walk the planet. You could call yourself Charlie and shave your head. You could pair thick-rimmed glasses with the skinny jeans and scarves you already wear and fully become the hipster that Rachel teases you about.

In New York, you are Quinn Fabray, and that means something different to every resident of the gayest loft ever.

In New Haven, you don’t need to know who you are.

/

Your roommate gets annoyed with the both of you really quickly. You’d feel bad about it except Rachel spends most of that time with her hand up your shirt and besides, Gwen spent the first semester attached at the face to her stubbly hobo boyfriend. You figure you’re allowed to get even once in a while.

Those become your favorite nights, stolen Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes Thursdays when Kurt and Santana are busy and Rachel is feeling lonely. Fridays and Saturdays are for plays and bistros; for old movies and popcorn; for hour-long debates because Rachel can’t shut up about how overrated Gertrude Stein is and you’re having trouble coming up with new ways to tell her she’s wrong.

But your favorite moments are the quiet ones, because Rachel is far more physically clingy than you’d have thought. You curl up on your tiny twin bed and just relax—you, with some Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Rachel with her iPod turned up just enough that you can hear the _Little Shop of Horrors_ soundtrack from her headphones, tinny and upbeat enough to make her toes bop along. You tease her about it sometimes, saying that she would make a perfect Audrey if only she could perfect the New York accent, which, after several months of living there, she still can’t.

And after the quiet moments, when Rachel’s music runs out and you can feel her watching you so you stop reading—always at the same part; you never make it to your favorite sentence but you don’t really mind—that’s when you start racking your brain for the right words. The words to describe Rachel’s hair, her fingers, the way you can feel it in your stomach and knees and shoulders when she kisses you.

As the weeks go on, words become less reliable. You learn Rachel through touch, taste, the way she sounds when she giggles. By the middle of April, Rachel’s fingers only mean something when they touch yours.

By the middle of April, Rachel sings your eyes and your breath and your hips, and you’ve mapped out an entire dictionary on her skin.

( _Yes, Rachel_ , you say when she asks you if you’re serious. _No, Rachel_ , you say when she asks if you want the lights off.

_Kiss me_ , you say when she asks you if you’re going to compare her to Santana Lopez.

Santana’s great. But there really isn’t any comparison.)

/

You keep it under wraps until the end of the school year. It was bound to get out eventually, especially when tensions are running high under the pressure of finals and you can’t get in as many visits as you’d like. Rachel is constantly frazzled, stressing about the end of the year showcase and a six-minute original monologue that she hasn’t yet written ( _and it has to be performed flawlessly, Quinn; I can’t think off the cuff as well as Kurt can. But I just don’t know what to write._

_It’s a monologue,_ you tell her. _Maybe you’re having problems writing it, but you don’t need to think of it that way. You have six minutes to talk uninterrupted and a lifetime’s worth of something to say._ )

She gets it written and recites it every night for you. Sometimes she even wakes up Kurt or Santana; those nights you go to sleep giggling.

But the day of the performance, nerves get the best of her—so much so that she can barely hold a conversation when you call her and try to calm her down.  She is jittery and distracted and you can’t decide if it’s annoying or adorable.

Suddenly there is a rustling sound and a clearly not-Rachel voice comes on the other end. “Q?”

You crinkle your eyebrows. “Santana?”

“Ugh, fix this tiny hellcat of anxiety because I swear, if I come home to her blocking the living room one more time…”

“You’re the one who invited herself and never left.”

“I thought maybe finally being in New York would calm her down.”

“Maybe it would if someone wasn’t constantly going through her shit.”

“I did that once,” Santana scoffs.

“Once,” you repeat.

“…A month.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Whatever.” You can practically feel Santana rolling her eyes. “She wants to talk to you again.”

Santana keeps talking to Rachel as she hands her phone back, and you have to say ‘babe’ three times before Rachel turns her attention to you again.

“Is living with Santana as much fun as you thought it’d be?” you tease.

“Mostly no,” Rachel grumbles. “But she’s a good friend, so I feel bad about complaining.”

“You’ll learn,” you say diplomatically. You’ve been friends with Santana for long enough to know that eventually, you just have to call her on her shit and not think about how she might react. “How long before you have to perform?”

“Sixteen minutes.”

“Do you want me to talk with you the whole time?”

Rachel exhales a shuddery breath. “No, thank you, Quinn. I think I just need to calm down and go stand in a quiet place.”

“What makes you calm?”

“You,” she replies immediately.

“Okay,” you smile. “Well since apparently talking to me isn’t good enough, I’ll just tell you that I’ve been keeping a surprise from you for a little bit.”

“Quinn!”

“It’s a good surprise,” you laugh. “I got an internship in the city for the summer.”

“Which city?” Rachel blurts dumbly.

“New York,” you answer, still laughing. “So you better make sure Santana doesn’t kill you before June because I’m gonna need somewhere to stay.”

“Oh my god, Quinn!”

“So think about that. Who cares how this final goes—even though you’re going to totally kill it—because we’ll have a New York summer together when it’s over, okay?”

“You really could have given me a little more advance notice. There are things to _plan_ , Quinn.”

“Not for you,” you dismiss. “I’ve got everything planned out. You just stay there and wait for me.”

“I’m terrible at waiting.”

“Go find a wall to lean against and call me as soon as you blow everyone away with your superb monologue.”

“You’re only saying that because you helped write it.”

“Has anyone told you you’re a bit combative? You’re lucky I love you.”

“I know,” Rachel murmurs. “Me, too.”

(It’s an odd choice of words, but you know what she means. Rachel’s always relied on ways other than words to express herself, anyway. She has a subtle way of getting her point across, which you wouldn’t have noticed at all if you hadn’t started looking. She’s always been dramatic eyebrows and a mouth that opens wider than it should. But even more than that, she’s shimmering eyes and fiddling fingers and lips that quirk twice before she smiles.

It was easier than you thought, saying ‘I love you.’ The words were out before you thought about them. When you finally did think about them, you realized that they were an inevitability. You’d been sort of saying them all along, only they came in the form of ‘tiny Jewish teenager’ and ‘shining star’ and ‘kind of friends’.

Rachel’s infected you with her subtlety and you didn’t realize until you were already terminal.)

When you hang up, you have three texts waiting for you.

**[From: Santana]** _I knew it, don’t think I wasn’t snooping on that entire conversation._

**[From: Santana]** _I never figured you for pet names, Fabray._

**[From: Santana]** _Or Berry’s vagina._

You have to chuckle and text back, because Santana will only get more vulgar the longer you ignore her.

_Guess we’re busted_. _Don’t rub Rachel’s face in it too much._

**[From: Santana]** _No, I’ll leave that to you._

_Be a little crasser, Santana._

**[From: Santana]** _Do you know what you’re doing, Quinn?_

_Of course_.

**[From: Santana]** _Does Rachel?_

When Santana asks you later why you never answered her text, you’ll say that your phone ran out of battery.

(It isn’t a lie. You sat and watched it happen. You just didn’t do anything to stop it.)

/

Rachel aces her final. She’s finally becoming the star she always dreamed of being. You knew she’d find the light eventually.

New York in the summer smells like humid garbage, but it feels like Rachel’s fingers on your back. It tastes like martinis and Rachel’s favorite chapstick. It sounds like banter that would out-gay anything on _Will and Grace_ ; like drunken laughter and the strangled noise that Santana makes when Brittany finds their loft; like the silence that comes when everyone gives them some space and you spend a perfect July night on the roof with Rachel and a blanket.

Your internship kind of stinks, which is disappointing because it’s New York and so many people have found themselves here. You kind of expected you’d do the same—a summer in New York with a girl you love and friends that feel more like family. But your professor is a snob and won’t let you write in sentence fragments, and you don’t know how to express yourself when you’re confined with commas and clauses.

So you write less and walk more. Rachel surprises you with a different street every day and takes you into every little shop you always wanted the quiet spots of New York to be made of. You ghost your hands over vintage dresses, laugh your fingertips across the spines of old books. You pick up a camera—on sale because the clerk says it’s beyond repair—and learn how to fix it. And suddenly words take a backseat to sights: you take pictures of Central Park and the dirty streets. You catch Santana and Brittany (because she hasn’t left and you hope she doesn’t) standing wrapped in each other, quiet against the frenzied background of Times Square. Kurt and Adam pose for you on a paddleboat.

(Rachel is everywhere. The subway, your bed, a stage, two photos in a bathroom because that was a sloppy night for everyone involved.

There are not enough clicks of the camera to capture how present Rachel is that summer, and you love it.)

/

The best part about the summer is that by mid-July, everyone is having sex and no one yells and you all wake up at two in the afternoon and make bacon and pizza and drink margaritas because it’s summer in New York and no one is telling you not to. You are nineteen and in charge of the whole world, and the whole world is contained in a crappy Bushwick apartment that doesn’t even have any internal walls.

Rachel keeps talking about sophomore year, how you can come to her plays and recitals and she can sit in coffee shops reading your stories or maybe on the subway on her way to class or backstage, five minutes before her curtain call. She muses about what the other New Directioners will think, because Kurt will eventually tell Blaine and everyone back in Ohio will hear about it. She laughs when she mentions how Finn probably never expected two of his ex-girlfriends to get together. You laugh and say that Puck probably did.

She asks you about your classes for the next year, tells you about all of hers before you can even answer. You just lie in her bed and play with her hair because it looks exactly like you’re listening.

You just don’t want to talk about school or plans or anything that hasn’t happened yet because you had enough future talk in high school. Summers are bridges between serious things, and you intend to make this one as long as the Great Wall. High school was about a destination, but college makes you appreciate the path.

Rachel has an intriguing path ahead of her, but she’s always preferred the talk to the walk.

Ever since your car crash, you’ve been looking for someone who likes walking as much as you do.

It’s been a year and you’re still searching.

/

**iii. there**

Maybe you should have listened to Rachel more, because school makes everything harder. It was easier in April, when everything was winding down and you had someone to work with. But it’s October now and everything is winding up and sometimes it feels like Rachel is working against you. You visit New York because it will always be more interesting than New Haven, but sometimes it’s just too much for you. Rachel is comfortable in the city but she is never relaxed, and after a week of classes with pretentious literary elitists (of which you always insist you _aren’t_ one, no matter what Rachel or Santana or Kurt might say), sometimes you just want to stay in your craphole of a town and take a two-day nap, interrupted only with food and sex.

It’s okay for a couple of weeks, and then you have to cancel your visit to go to a reading. Three weeks later, Rachel bails for an audition. She gets the part, so you can’t be totally annoyed. Everything is forgiven when you go to opening night and watch her try her very hardest on stage. The thing about Rachel is that her average is already better than most people’s great, so when she really makes an effort at something, she glows.

For the two months the play runs, Rachel is a star in every way.

The distance starts to get easier. Rachel has her play. You’ve scored a column in the school’s newspaper, and even though you’re pretty sure no one reads newspapers anymore, you put everything you’ve got into it. Words and pictures and feelings so fleeting you didn’t even really know you had them. Your camera pretty much goes everywhere you do now, and when classmates tell you that you should trade it in for a better one (because it’s an obsolete model; because if you break it again you’ll never find the parts; because it’s not really a good camera if it didn’t cost half your savings), you just ignore them. They’re the ones you take pictures of from behind—when they’re not looking; when they can’t see you; when they’ll never know that you’re stealing the art from them.

Rachel surprises you the night before you’re set to go home for Thanksgiving. She confesses that Santana did a little snooping and helped her get a seat on your flight back to Ohio, and you have to laugh because that’s so Santana—trying to fix problems in the most invasive way possible.

(Half an hour into the flight, when Rachel is sleeping on your shoulder and you remember just how soft she is, you decide to pop over to the Lopez household for a really big thank you-hug.)

It’s the most comfortable Thanksgiving you’ve ever had because Rachel’s dads are really nice and don’t gush over the two of you. Leroy dazzles you with his wit and Hiram asks to read some of your essays because he has a friend in the publishing industry.

(You shake your head because _of course he does_ , but when he says you have promise you can’t stop blushing and you won’t look at Rachel.)

You do end up stopping by Santana’s house and it’s nice to see her parents again. You even think Santana might agree with you.

Brittany’s mom is as welcoming as ever, and her sister asks you about your shoes because she always disagrees with some part of your outfit. Rachel fits right in with the mix of manic and flustered energy that always fills the Pierce house.

It’s only when you say hi to Kurt’s family that you feel uneasy because you haven’t seen Finn since Thanksgiving last year. He was all smiles, but then again, you weren’t banging the girl he considered the love of his life. This year, he is conveniently absent, and it wouldn’t bother you except Rachel doesn’t smile once while you’re in the house, not even when Burt (who may be the most wonderful father you wish you had) suggests a karaoke night.

When you take a cab to the airport to go back to school, you purposefully steal Rachel’s favorite scarf out of her purse. She can handle a week without it, but you know that she’ll come to you to get it back. She hasn’t been to Connecticut since the beginning of November and you just want to be quiet with her, like you used to. You want a bed where suddenly, Rachel is lying beside you and you’ll make love in the time of cholera. You want Rachel to giggle at the plant in your window that she calls Audrey II when she thinks you can’t hear. You want to read her your favorite words even though you know she falls asleep before you get to them.

So you steal her scarf and put on the best poker face you can muster when she asks if you’ve seen it. You say no and text her six hours later, when you’re both finally home, that it must have gotten mixed in with your clothes because you found it while you were unpacking your suitcase. She huffs and puffs and groans in that perfectly Rachel way she does everything and says she’ll come get it over the weekend.

You spend the week buying her favorite foods and setting up her perfect Netflix queue. You’ve drifted apart, you think, because Rachel requires so much attention, and not just when it comes to her emotions. She is comforted more by a gentle hug than soothing words, and it’s no wonder she and Finn couldn’t last. He isn’t exactly the expert at providing either of those things.

But this upcoming weekend will fix everything because you will be nice and supportive and so wonderfully there when Rachel needs you. And she’ll do the same for you, because you haven’t decided what kind of attention you prefer. You’ve always taken from people what you wanted—at first, it was calculated and mean, and after that you just didn’t know how to stop. But you’ve grown since high school. You had a child. You almost died. So now, you think you might take whatever people give you. This weekend you intend to figure out how much Rachel wants to give.

She gives you a lot, as it turns out—with a laugh, with a smile, with so many kisses you stop trying to count. It isn’t the giving that’s the problem.

Rachel loves to give. She just doesn’t always share.

The weekend is perfect and you shouldn’t cry when Rachel leaves but you do anyway because it feels like a really heavy goodbye. Gwen asks you what’s wrong and you don’t have the heart to tell her.

Relationships work because people make time for each other. Brittany didn’t stay in New York past the summer, but she’s down at UNC because she likes their psychology program and the sun. She fits right in with the drawling courtesy of the almost-South because Brittany doesn’t know how not to be nice to people. If you were her, you’d lose yourself in a new environment, because it’s so different from the passive-aggressive tendencies of the Midwest. But Brittany doesn’t do that because she isn’t you, and so she and Santana have found a way to work past the distance. They’ve revised their methods from last year’s mishaps, and now they call each other at least once every day—even if it’s late, even if they don’t want to, even if it’s just a voicemail. Voicemails are enough because they let them be enough.

You have had two important relationships in your life. With Finn and Puck, if they weren’t enough, you made them give you more until they were. But you found independence in you senior year of high school and ever since then you’ve jettisoned anything that stopped working.

You don’t want to do that to Rachel. She’s trying, in her own way. She tells you about her plays and says she wants you to see them without ever telling you when. She’s offering just a little so you can grab on and meet her the rest of the way, but you don’t want to do that. _Come down for the weekend_ , you keep saying. _There’s a wonderful musical in town_ , you keep saying.

( _I have a lot of musicals at home_ , she counters. She never actually says it but you hear it all the same.)

So you take a cue from Rachel and stop trying, just a little at a time. You miss a phone call or two. You actually spend more time at the newspaper instead of just using it as an excuse.

You take pictures of leaves peeking out from underneath snow banks. You take pictures of trees with withered branches. You take pictures of frozen streets and bridges.

Eventually, Gwen mentions that you haven’t verbally talked with Rachel in over a week, and she only rolls her eyes a little when you drag out some old Carpenters CDs that you stole from your mom.

(The Fabrays might be a lot of things, but they’ve always excelled at sadness.

You were happy with Rachel, but this is the home you still haven’t outgrown.

Maybe someday someone will drag you out of it.)

/

She calls you at the beginning of March—the month where nothing ever happens, but that’s Rachel for you.

“We’re kind of over, right?” she says, and you’re transported back two years to Figgins’s office. It feels exactly like that except the opposite.

“Yeah,” you murmur. “I think so.”

“I’m sorry, Quinn.”

“Me, too.”

“I love you,” she whispers.

“I know,” you say, and you do. “I love you, too.”

She means it just as much as you do, and you mean it a lot.

Just not enough.

/

**iv. gone**

You keep in touch over the years, mostly because Rachel has attached herself to Santana like a leech and Santana likes her too much to peel her off (even if she won’t say it out loud.) They’re the strangest friends you’ve ever seen, but you know they’re sincere.

It’s weird, at first. You don’t go to New York for a couple of months. Santana drops by one weekend with whiskey. Brittany comes a week after that with brownies.

Then, suddenly, you’re in Boston with a friend and Rachel is there visiting some family you never got to meet, and your first instinct is to run away because it still feels too soon, but instead you stay because it’s been too long. Maybe you cry a little, maybe she does too, but it’s always with a smile.

It takes some time, but it feels good to think about Rachel Berry and smile again.

/

Five years later you’re both making something of your lives. Rachel’s doing everything. She’s in shows, she’s making albums, she’s trying her hand at directing small productions. Every time she calls you, she has a new story about some project and you wonder how she’ll have time for them all, but she always does. Rachel is a magician. Maybe not the most impressive one—her levitation wires are always showing; her fingers are never quick enough to hide the card up her sleeve—and yet just when you think everything is going to go up in flames, she soars. She releases six dozen doves from her hat. She pulls a piece of string through her lip without ever breaking her smile.

And you? That camera of yours, the hobby, the side job, it has served you very well. You take whatever job anyone will give you—weddings, photo shoots, news coverage—because you’re just so excited to be photographing at all and getting paid for it. You’ve grown out of elitist-Quinn just like you outgrew Sue Sylvester. You don’t need to pick and choose when the world has so much to share with you.

That still doesn’t preclude you from submitting a few pieces to an art gallery so pretentious even your father would have trouble fitting in, and it certainly doesn’t do anything to quash the sense of accomplishment you feel when one of them is accepted.

And when Rachel comes to the opening, dressed to kill and toting a dashing man you’ve never met but whom you surmise to be Ben (by all accounts sane enough and well-equipped to handle Rachel Berry),  you smile. It’s a bashful smile because it always will be between you two, and she returns one just like it.

She introduces you to Ben and you introduce her to Elliot and the night turns out to be very enjoyable. You talk just like friends who have understood each other for a very long time, which is good because that’s what you are.

You assume Rachel has told Ben who you are. You’ve certainly told Elliot who she is. He knows.

But he will never fully appreciate how much better you are for having loved Rachel Berry.


End file.
